Billabong Odyssey

Surf's up. But you'll need much more than a board to catch the waves ridden by the surfers in this documentary: you'll require jet-skis and global positioning satellites, not to mention unlimited time, deep pockets and a big commercial sponsor.

This is a film about a project to find and ride the world's biggest waves, an enterprise that's about as spontaneous as a NASA expedition, although there are some extravagant last-minute changes of plan when, for example, the surf in France doesn't measure up, and a new destination is called for.

Billabong Odyssey, named after and sponsored by a surfwear company, covers quite a bit of the same ground as the recent documentary Step Into Liquid. Many of the surfers and locations turn up again, much of the rhetoric is similar, although Step Into Liquid had a bit more variety and eccentricity, and a little more sense of history.

Once again, we meet the boys from Mavericks, at Santa Cruz; once again they go out tow-surfing, using jet-skis to catch the monumental waves, at Cortes Bank, and again, Layne Beachley makes a brief appearance.

Director Philip Boston seems torn between loading us with information and conjuring up a story - touching on various "conflicts", such as a contest between Brazilian and US surfers, or a rivalry between wild-child Brad Gerlach and straight-arrow Mike Parson that turned into a beautiful friendship, as the pair bonded over tow-surfing. (There's still something vaguely unsettling, to me, about hearing surfers extol the wonders of the jet-ski, but I guess I'm just old-fashioned.)

In the end, the raison d'etre of this movie is the footage of waves, and it's as towering and overpowering as you would expect. Watching and listening to the stuff in between, however, is hard work.